What is Technical SEO? The basics for website audits

Is your website built to respond to the needs of your website visitors, and the search engines they use? This is the question that a technical SEO audit effectively asks of your website. The technical aspects and components of your website will determine how it works, and considering a well-functioning website is a key driver of organic traffic, leads and revenue for your business, we’re guessing you’d like your website to be a smooth operator.

As your website exists in a shifting space which is never static, the only way to make sure it can ride out any metaphorical bumps in the road, of which there are many, (broken links! rogue duplicate content! algorithm updates!) is to conduct regular audits of its technical performance. It may not feel as related to your customer experience as say, your brand marketing, but your website’s infrastructure - the databases, servers and storage - has as much of an impact on your ability to acquire and convert leads as your website design.

A high-performing website is a technically-optimised one. So, if you need your website to work harder in the digital marketing department, a technical SEO website audit is the best place to start. As the Development Director here at Mud, I regularly conduct audits as part of our process in continuously reviewing and optimising the performance of websites we’ve built for our clients. Not to mention, diagnosing issues to tackle in the design and development of new website projects, too.

In this resource, I’ll introduce you to technical SEO and the role it plays in meeting search engine criteria. Then we’ll get into the basics of web auditing and how to go about identifying and rectifying the issues which may be affecting your site’s performance when it comes to search.

What is technical SEO?

Technical SEO is the term used to refer to all of your website’s technical aspects, and how they can be optimised for search engine crawling, indexing and ranking. If a search engine can understand your website content by crawling and indexing it efficiently, then it can rank it in a user’s search results, which sends new users (potential subscribers, clients, customers) to your website. How well your site ranks in among the competition depends on the quality of your content (known as on-page SEO), and the technical elements which make up your site’s infrastructure - that’s technical SEO.

What is a technical SEO audit?

A technical SEO audit is a systematic evaluation of how well the technical aspects of your website support search engine requests and the user experience. By conducting one, you will gain a clear picture of how well your website is performing, and identify issues which you can resolve to enhance search performance and user experience.  

This isn’t a one-off task to be shelved once completed. Any major site updates should be followed by an audit to check all is in good working order, and regular audits should be conducted on a quarterly basis, minimum as part of regular website optimisation and management.

What does a technical SEO Audit look at?

What are all these technical elements that we’re talking about? Let’s break it down, and discuss the specific aspects of your website you would be focusing on as part of an audit.

Crawling and indexing

Crawling is a process that involves the URLs on a website being loaded and analysed for content and any issues. It typically starts with a particular URL starting point such as a site map or a home page, and the robot follows links to other pages it finds in the content. Search engines discover content by crawling, and the process helps surface unknown or unexpected issues that can affect SEO, UX and general quality. Indexing is how a search engine stores content for users to find. To be added to a search engine index, a webpage must allow indexing.

Most websites are produced using a CMS for content and a series of templates for display, which can result in thousands of pages. Even with a limited number of templates there can be significant variations in display and how well pages might perform for SEO, so using a crawl tool helps to surface errors that you can fix. A crawl can help to show all kinds of issues or areas for improvement for SEO but also for general quality and UX. Pages must be indexed to appear in search results. Mistakes in indexing, such as preventing pages or even entire websites from being indexed can result in a website being dropped from search results, which would have a huge impact on a business that relies on being found in online search.

By using a tool to crawl your website, you can assess and report on the quality of pages that make up your website, fixing issues that are brought to the surface. The quality of your site has a direct impact on how your visitors perceive your brand, and interact with your website Many crawler tools can report on things like page download speed, the use of excessively large images and broken links or inaccessible pages, all problems, that when fixed, could boost perception and interaction, and therefore, your search performance.

Site architecture and navigation

How your site’s content is organised and presented affects how well it ranks in the search results. Think neat, tidy, and logical; website home pages with intuitive menu navigation that transport a user (and crawlers) smoothly to key content sections such as product pages, blog articles, services you offer etc.

The more logical your site structure and well-connected all your content is the better it will perform in the search results. Poor internal linking with lots of orphan pages - that’s pages which aren’t connected to other webpages - are signs of neglect and your search rankings will be impacted as a result. Users don’t always land on your home page, they could come direct to a page deep within your site, so a clear indication of structure (and the page’s position within it) and the ability to navigate to related pages (and the major sections of the site) is crucial for users to get a good experience.

Without good architecture, it may not be clear to users and crawlers how content is structured (i.e. related: a URL of services/legal/wills clearly gives context to the wills page) Without good navigation, users may have a poor experience, and crawlers may not find all of your content. All of this is bad news if you were shooting for the top of Google’s search results

Page speed and performance

If you’re responsible for website management, you may already have a good idea of your website’s load times. How quickly your content loads on various devices and networks is a core website quality indicator. Use tools like PageSpeed Insights to measure load times, and quickly identify slow-loading pages, oversized images, and unoptimised code.

The speed your website loads at has a direct impact on users and how they view your site. Too slow, and it creates confusion; slow loading content causes page elements to render in the wrong way, creating a distracting experience that affects accessibility, too. For most users, the frustration of waiting results in eventual abandonment altogether - bad news for your customer acquisition targets. Plus, from what we know, Google may use Core Web Vitals as part of its algorithm, so it affects how well your content ranks in search results too.

Mobile-friendliness

There’s still a huge lean towards designing for the desktop experience - it’s what most of our clients come to us for. But the dominance of mobile traffic across many sectors means mobile site experiences have to be equal, if not better, than the desktop experience. Mobile users expect even faster load times and content that is even quicker to digest than desktop users; image sizes and video quality need to be optimised for downloading over mobile networks and displaying at mobile screen sizes.

Google uses a mobile-first indexing model, so your mobile experience needs to be on point if you want to captialise on all traffic coming your way. Responsive mobile-first design and mobile-first indexing compliance optimises the UX for the device in use; ensuring your content is easily accessible and digestible, regardless of device and network speed. Techniques such as lazy loading of images means that browsers load what’s immediately visible on the screen, then load images further down the page only when they are scrolled into view. This improves initial page load times, reduces bandwidth and improves the UX. Page speed is optimised for the device. No need to download large images that are only required for larger screens

Security

Search engines want to know they’re sending users to secure and reliable sources, so audits should include a check for HTTPS implementation and active SSL certificates. SSL certificates are used to encrypt data transferred between the browser and server, and are now used across entire websites, regardless of whether any sensitive data is transferred. SSL certificates have a finite life and need to be renewed periodically, in order to protect any sensitive data in the requests and responses.

Structured data

Optimising your website content for search is a no-brainer - and structured data is just another technique you can use. Google can understand things like headings and quotes from your html markup, but cannot easily determine the context of the content. Structured data provides a way to define content in common forms (such as an Event) which search engines can understand and interpret. Audit schema markup and validate it using tools like Google’s Rich Results Test to provide Google with the information it needs to display your content in a more engaging way.

Error management

The crux of an audit lies in error management. Much of what we’ve discussed already boils down to this; the purpose of a technical audit is to help you maintain a healthy website. Identify and fix 404 errors, broken links, content inaccuracies, data capture failure, redirect issues and any hosting problems, and you’re working towards presenting the best possible content to search engines, and the best on-site experience to users.

Each website error chips away at a user’s perception of your brand, and affects their experience, potentially making it challenging to interact with your business offering and could derail their goal of becoming a customer completely. Plus, broken links negatively affect your SEO ranking, potentially inhibiting lead acquisition. Run a tight ship; do regular audits, and catch the errors before they catch you out.

Tools to conduct a technical SEO audit

Here are the tools you'll need to asses your site and conduct a website audit:

• Google Search Console for performance insights.
• Screaming Frog for in-depth crawling analysis.
• Semrush or ahrefs for identifying technical issues.
• GTmetrix or PageSpeed Insights for performance optimisation.

How to start a technical SEO audit

So we’ve introduced you to the key areas your website audit should focus on, and some of the tools you can use for identifying and analysing these issues and opportunities to improve your websites technical performance. But how do you go about conducting the audit effectively? Here’s a step-by-step guide to take you through the process:

1. Audit preparation

   Get your tabs open with your chosen tools from the recommendations above, and log in to your CMS. Then a couple of things: if you're auditing a staging site and have that set to not be indexed, update your robots settings to allow access by your chosen audit tool crawler. If your site has a cache layer, make sure everything has been cached to ensure your audit does not show any misleading page load times.

    

2. Check crawlability and indexing

   Use a crawl tool such as the Site Audit tool from ahrefs.com or Screaming Frog to crawl your site. Both tools can check the Core Web Vitals of each page it finds provided you have added a Google API key to your project settings. If you’re reviewing a live site, Google Search Console (GSC) will list any crawl or index issues it has come across. If you’re testing a staging site that has production settings (i.e. that it should be indexable), you might want to put that behind a username and password so that your audit tool can reach it, but the wider world (and search engines) can’t.

    

3. Evaluate page speed and performance

   Once you’ve got your crawl report, review the actions outlined (and what you see in GSC)  - typically graded for importance - and make a plan for which ones you can fix or improve. If your report does not include page speed performance, choose the pages most important for your site and run them through Page Speed Insights. You will only get Core Web Vitals for live sites that have enough traffic to generate results for real user experiences, but you can use the lab data (simulated user experiences) in those scans to see any obvious issues.

    

4. Assess mobile usability and security

   Your audit report will make it clear whether you’ve been serving up a poor mobile experience, and help you identify where you can make improvements. It will also review how secure the service you’re offering is, are account pages protected by a user login, and are your checkout pages not indexed to protect your customers? This is a good time to double check your SSL is secure using a service such as SSL Server Test. 

    

5. Review structured data and content consistency

   From the directory structure interpretation of your site based on its URL structure, your audit report will allow you to review structured data and address issues with duplicate content, issues with SEO meta data, and where you might be cannibalising keywords (more on-page than technical but can be passed to the content team). Tools like ahrefs Chrome toolbar can show you structured data for a page you’re viewing in the browser, giving you the ability to review pages of particular interest or importance.

    

6. Check for errors

   Finally, you can address main issues with 404s or inaccessible pages, and redirect issues. Removing these dead ends will optimise your website performance. For more consistent site management, set up monitoring to receive notifications when these unexpected errors crop up.

Common technical issues, and how to fix them

Poor crawlability or indexing issues:

• Lack of a XML sitemap file. Typically your CMS will generate a sitemap for you, or you can create one manually.
• Lack of internal linking. Do a content audit to review and update, or redirect orphan pages.
• Incorrect robots file or robots settings for particular URLs. Check that your /robots.txt file is not set to block anything you want indexed. Robots can also be set as a meta tag on each page, in a response header served by the web server, or in your CMS, so if any robots restrictions are found, there may be more than one place to look.

Duplicate content or improper canonical tags:

• Core content shared across different URLs isn't doing you any favours. Collate and streamline content onto the same URL
• Remove any duplication of content, especially where it has been replicated in whole or in part to target specific keywords - Google can see straight through this shameless strategy!
• Incorrectly setting canonical on listing and faceted search pages — the canonical should be your ‘view all’ URL and your faceted/paginated urls should reference that as the canonical.
• Incorrect markup for multi-language sites can cause much confusion. This a technical fix or CMS configuration, so talk to your developer.

Lack of mobile optimisation or responsive design:

• Not using responsive images or lazy loading.  This is a website build issue, so ask your developer to update images and set up lazy loading.
• Poor mobile responsiveness can only be resolved by developing a mobile website with responsive layouts.
• Loading video automatically, instead use a poster image that gets replaced with the playing video on click.

Slow-loading pages and poor Core Web Vitals scores:

• A poorly-built website that is slow to query the CMS for content. I’ll admit, there isn’t a quick fix here, as there are a wide range of contributing factors. As a first step, get some technical expertise to assess whether your site has been built in an efficient way that scales for performance (ideally using cached content to avoid having to build the page with database content on each hit).
• Lack of caching, use static page caching and a global CDN like Cloudflare, store images and other assets on a CDN.
• Layouts that move around as they load. Instead, use placeholder content until the desired media has loaded.

In short…

Your site is online to be seen, so don’t let it fall back into the shadows of the web. Technical SEO audits are your means of keeping tabs on your website’s performance and maintaining its visibility, effectively giving Google a nudge to keep looking your way. Regular auditing enables you to be proactive about resolving issues; issues that may be preventing your site from climbing up the SEO rankings. Plus, reports with clear errors and actions also help promote cross-team collaboration towards site maintenance, and who doesn’t love a good bit of teamwork?

…can we help you?

We understand that even with a basic understanding of website auditing, having the resources to conduct one means that this key site maintenance task can be shelved for that ever elusive lull in work, the one that must be around the corner…?

We’re experts in conducting technical audits of websites at every stage of their lifecycle. If you’ve got some concerns about your website’s performance or search visibility, contact the development team at Mud to get a clearer picture of just how your website looks from a user and Google point-of-view.